The House of Early Sorrows
A Memoir in Essays
This book can be opened with
Note on our eBooks: you can read our eBooks (ePUB or PDF) on the free Fordham Books app on iOS, Android, and desktop. To purchase a digital book you will need to create an account if you don’t already have one. After purchasing you will receive instructions on how to get started.
WINNER OF THE IASA BOOK AWARD!
AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNER!
As the child of children of immigrants, Louise DeSalvo was at first reluctant to write about her truths. Her abusive father, her sister’s suicide, her illness. In this stunning collection of her captivating and frank essays on her life and her Italian-American culture, Louise DeSalvo centers on her beginnings, reframing and revising her acclaimed memoiristic essays, pieces that were the seeds of longer collections, to reveal her true power as a memoirist: the ability to dig ever deeper for personal and political truths that illuminate what it means to be a woman, a second-generation American, a writer, and a scholar.
Each essay is driven by a complex inquiry that examines the personal, familial, social, ethnic, and historical dimensions of identity. Collectively, they constitute a story significantly different from DeSalvo’s memoirs when they first published, where the starkness of their meaning became blunted by material surrounding them. DeSalvo has also restored material written and then deleted—experiences she was too reticent to reveal before, in writing about her sister’s suicide, her husband’s adultery, her own sexual assault. The essays also include new material to shift the ballast of an essay as her life has changed significantly through the years.
The House of Early Sorrows is a courageous exploration not only of the DeSalvo’s family life and times, but also of our own.
A lyrical, moving collection. DeSalvo performs a complex inquiry that examines the personal, familial, social, ethnic, and historical dimensions of identity. We realize we are not reading to find out about DeSalvo's life and times, but our own.---Richard Hoffman, Half the House: A Memoir
The essays... continues DeSalvo's lifelong quest to understand her past, her family, and herself that is the foundation of all her memoir writing.---VIA: Voices in Italian Americana
Introduction: Ghost Writer
Lifeboat
Cutting the Bread
Dark White
White on Black
Passing the Saint
Fourteenth Street
The House of Early Sorrows
My Sister's Suicide
breathless, adjective
V and I
Adultery Stories
Old Flame
Moving On
Acknowledgments
